Nvidia outs new Pascal Titan X

Nvidia has taken the wraps off a new Titan X, featuring a new Pascal GPU, 11 TFLOPs of performance and sporting a $1,200 price tag.

Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, revealed the new product this morning at a special meet-up at Stanford University themed around artificial intelligence. The surprise announcement is supposedly the result of a bet between Jen-Hsun and Brian Kelleher, Nvidia's top hardware engineer, with the latter betting that Nvidia would be able to achieve more than 10 teraflops (TFLOPs) of computing performance from a single chip. With the new Titan X, that's exactly what Nvidia has done.

The new chip is GP102, which increases the original Titan X transistor count from 8 billion to a staggering 12 billion. Using Nvidia's 16nm Pascal architecture, it is the biggest GPU ever built, containing a whopping 3,584 CUDA cores. The clock speeds have also been ramped up significantly, with the boost clock shooting up from 1.08GHz to 1.53GHz in the new card. Nvidia has stuck with 12GB of VRAM, but has upgraded from GDDR5 to the GDDR5X introduced with the GTX 1080. Peak memory bandwidth is set at 480GB/sec (up from 336GB/sec), so given that the GDDR5X is clocked at 10Gbps that means Nvidia is using a 384-bit wide memory bus again.

The end result is a card capable of delivering 11 TFLOPs of 32-bit floating point performance and 44 TOPS INT8, a new deep learning inferencing instruction. Nvidia says the new card will be up to 60 percent faster than the previous Titan X too.

Given the GTX 1080's already high price point, you won't be surprised to learn that the new card will not come cheap. Available exclusively from Nvidia's online store on August 2, it will set you back an eye-watering $1,200. UK pricing has yet to be confirmed, but we'd be surprised if you got much change from £1,200 once VAT is included.